http://tinyurl.com/2wqf8y2

You didn’t bother to mention that you advocate the notion that “locking” or “latching” is part of Dawkins’ “weasel” program. You make that claim in the PDF with your program. That’s a falsehood. You should remove that as soon as possible. The point of the post that you are replying to is that Dawkins demonstrated, on video, that no “latching” was going on in his program, and yet it converged.

Your search for programs implementing “weasel” was flawed, too. I’ve posted several myself over the years, and *none* of those ever used “latching”. I don’t think any in the big list compiled by Ian Musgrave had that flaw.

Your method of mutating strings is off, too. As you would see in my recent Python implementation, the mutation rate is applied to each and every “base” in the string to determine whether it mutates or not. This allows for the possibility of multiple mutations within one offspring string. Yours, instead, is *described* as determining the chance that a string accrues one mutation in it, which is both idiosyncratic and also does not reflect the biological process. This is one place within “weasel” that we can get closer to what happens in biology. I haven’t confirmed that your code matches your text description.

Your “Table 5″ does not show that Dawkins uses “latching”. I’ve had a batch of posts here addressing that error. Here’s something from one of them:

Dembski and others make much of the fact that the few lines Dawkins used to illustrate output from his “weasel” don’t show an instance of a stepback in performance. They insist that this means that Dawkins must have used a rule in his program that would not allow a stepback in performance, but that is simply induction gone wild and sloppy thinking. One can verify with my page that for reasonable mutation rates and population sizes, stepbacks are rare. Why is this? To get a stepback, every single string in a new population has to be have at least one less matching character than was present in its parent from the previous generation. The more strings that are generated in a new population, the smaller the probability that all of them will alter at least one of the already-matched characters from the parent string. So small population size is critical to observing stepbacks. Also, strings changing at least one already-matched character from the parent are less likely with lower mutation rates, so a high mutation rate is also critical to observing stepbacks. Neither of these conditions is didactically similar to the process that Dawkins wanted to make an analogy to, natural selection in biology.

How likely is it that Dawkins could present a run that shows no obvious change in an already-matched character when the best match out of the population every ten generations is shown? One can do runs to characterize this, which I’ve done.

It is quite plausible that Dawkins used a population size and mutation rate that would give an expectation of less than half the time one would be able to see such in summary output. Your conclusion is unsupported by the evidence.

If your “weasel” is programmed not to latch and still doesn’t converge, you have an error in the program. See my post here for a graph showing the difference between what Dembski calls “partitioned search” and an actual “weasel” program. It is Dembski’s mistaken view of “partitioned search” that you should find “predetermined, and thus of no interest”.

Apparently, I need to finish up the series of posts I started back in spring 2009.

The Weasel Saga, With Math — Part 1

This post lays out the math for random search.

The Weasel Saga, With Math — Part 2

That one delves into some of the differences “weasel” has from random search. I presented a minimalistic “weasel” program in Python and output from an example run. By the way, the example run shows a match of 10 characters out of 28 by generation 10, so we can reduce this to practice and you can explain to me how I “cheated” to get that example. I don’t think that you’ll be able to do so, since I didn’t.

I suspect that Part 2 is going to be a sufficient base for discussion of where we differ.

Where I’m going with the third installment, should I ever get time to finish it up, is to include things such as I discussed here.

Please note that I am not advocating ID or “creationism,” I just cannot (yet?) see how random mutations can “accumulate” in the fashion suggested by professors Dawkins and Coyne.

Constructive feedback would be of great value to me, as I would really like to get an understanding of how “cumulative selection” can possibly work…

Bottom line, regarding Dawkins “Weasels” from TBW: there is no way that a random algorithm can produce 9 matching characters (out of 28) in ten generations (as shown by Dawkins in TBW). Not without some kind of cheating.

Henry Norman
Tagaytay City, Philippines

“weasel” wasn’t intended to be some monumental achievement. It was essentially the computer science equivalent of a napkin doodle. Dawkins doesn’t have the original code, just as I’m sure he isn’t using the original computer, either.

But Dawkins gave us a description of the steps the program takes, and any number of people have programmed their own “weasel” instances that get results like Dawkins reported without “latching”. It isn’t Dawkins who needs to substantiate a claim; it is the religiious antievolutionists who have been in obvious error about this for years.

The video demonstrates that the “weasel” program used by Dawkins was not latching, no source code is needed to confirm that. The religious antievolutionists have themselves latched onto the utterly demented notion that Dawkins used a different “latching” program for “weasel” output in “The Blind Watchmaker” and “New Scientist” in 1986 than in the 1987 video. Why is it demented? First, because “latching” is completely unlike the biology, and Dawkins is an accomplished biologist. Second, because the program Dawkins obviously did use in the video documentary about his book “The Blind Watchmaker” obviously doesn’t use latching. Third, because the math says that for reasonable population sizes and mutation rates, one doesn’t expect to see the best candidates from successive generations lose correct characters. Fourth, because Dawkins himself has said that he didn’t do anything of the sort.

I did hear that a commentator on the UD thread contacted Dawkins, who advised no latching took place. Why not simply have Dawkins produce the actual source code? Or is Dawkins balking at such a move?

Regards,

Patrick

As I noted on AtBC, it should be instructive to see the response in an instance where antievolutionists get the video-level evidence that they often claim is what it would take to make them change their minds.

I note that Gordon Mullings at UD has taken it rather badly so far, lapsing into bizarre fantasies about Dawkins’ actions in 1986 and 1987 rather than accepting the far simpler explanation that Mullings had the wrong end of the argument all along.

Just in the interest of full disclosure.

David